#instamilk

Introduction

In the three previous chapters, somehow the theme of the alternatives’ milk always stood out. In this chapter we decide to analyze them because they are always part of the controversy and till now, we didn’t really take them into consideration, in order to examine better other aspects of the discussion. In this fourth part we want to focus the attention on the users and their opinion about this theme. After some tries on different social network, we decide that the best one to reach our aim is Instagram. Other factors which brought us to choose this social network are really functional ones: first of all, the contents are almost completely public, then, thanks to the hashtags, the research and the categorization it’s easier and lastly we have the opportunity to examine the visual part.

A lot of different milk’s alternatives came out during the whole analysis, but we want to examine the ones more relevant for the users, so we use google trend and, looking at the results in the rising searches section, with the query milk health, and as it’s visible in the results reported below, the two alternatives more discussed are almond milk and coconut milk. Furthermore, both of them have an increasing curve, started in the last years.

Protocol

Searching milk health on Google Trends, two milk alternatives, almond and coconut milk, appear in the first 10 correlated results of the rising searches box.

#almondmilk and #coconutmilk are searched on Instagram and for each hashtag the first 2000 results are extracted, using Instagram Hashtag Explorer, and so sorted by descending amount of likes.

For the first 100 pictures of almond milk and the first 100 pictures of coconut milk, the hashtags contained in the captions are employed to categorized them in health, intolerance, fitness, vegan, nutrients and traditional food. A second analysis is done by visual subjects in evident presence of the brand, glass and cup, recipe, meme, people and animal. The pictures are manually extracted, through a screenshot and a Photoshop’s action, that cut them, because none of the tools does it accurately.

How to read it

The different dots are, through their sizes, the quantities of hashtag divided by category. The categories are representative of the motivation why the user has probably shared the image.

Findings

Just looking at the order and the name of the motivations it’s simple to understand that the users share the pictures, mainly because of a choice related to a kind of healthy and natural diet and a specific kind of style.

During this analysis, the motivations are not the only data interesting we’ve found. Looking at images themselves, we can see a big quantity of pictures with cup or glass, as we expect, but there is also the presence of photos which contain the box or bottle with the logo of the producers visible. We decide to keep in mind this fact and use it for a deeper exploration of the theme.

Data

Timestamp: 10/12/2015

Data source: Google Trends, Instagram

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